Digital narrations of urban history

In discussions on urbanism, the need to involve new actors has been a major theme of recent debate. In this field, throughout Europe, various ways of allowing citizens to take a more direct part in planning is stressed. It is also important to look at the role or lack of role played by particular research fields. Architecture plays a major role in city planning. While archaeology has become increasingly involved in field projects in urban environments, the discipline seldom plays an important role in city planning. The digital tools for documenting and designing have changed the approach to many procedures and have created new figures involved in the process of facing architecture and archaeology. In several countries and particular cities this situation has been questioned during the last decades. In Sweden, certain studies indicate an increased interest in an active involvement of archaeology from the part of individual municipalities and provincial governments, and even on the state level in certain cases. In France, Lavendhomme at Inrap has discussed various possible new kinds of uses of archaeology in the planning process, and similar discussions start to appear in other countries. In the UK, archaeologists are increasingly involved in mitigating heritage impacts of building projects at the design stage rather than during construction (excavating). To take just one example, in Sweden the archaeologist Stefan Larsson has developed a project with the municipality of Kalmar, in which city planners, architects and archaeologists collaborate in making suggestions for a city plan in a segment of the city. In this workshop we will focus on possible new ways of collaboration between architects and archaeologists. With a particular stress over the intelligent use of digital solution for documenting, designing and representing the contest and the new ideas. We wish to open a new kind of communication between these research fields and related praxis. The possible contributions from archaeology include questions of conservation, diffusion of archaeological knowledge by different means, but also other fields, including practical knowledge on the development of particular districts over time, general knowledge in comparative studies of urbanism, questions of design or questions of “gestalt” in urban settings, and the intersections between archaeology, architecture and public art. Last but not least the topic of the communication, which in our time is something totally linked to the digital media. We hope this workshop will help to open this field, and that it will be followed by other scholarly meetings on more limited particular cases and questions and, potentially, by a larger conference building on the workshop’s outcomes. Pablo Rodriguez Navarro, Giorgio Verdiani, Per Cornell

Alexandria University, 2019

The studies of the United Nations showed that fifty-five percent of the world's population lives in urban areas, a proportion that is expected to increase to sixty-eight percent by 20501; this puts a huge load on current cities to absorb such an increase in population and services, which simultaneously affects the built urban fabric. Alexandria witnessed a demolishing of many listed buildings to be replaced by big concrete blocks, which threatened the city's identity. These heritage-listed buildings are part of the urban heritage; they are important to the community and the urban fabric, ''Cities need old buildings so badly it is probably impossible for vigorous streets and districts to grow without them''2. The twenty-one century witnessed a great evolution in the field of digital documentation as a method of heritage conservation. Virtual databases stores detailed information about the conserved objects, which can be accessed and viewed by using portable devices. The research formulates theoretical and methodological framework for digital documentation of urban heritage, in an attempt to discuss the main methods of digital documentation and its impact on the urban conservation process with different cases of study and finally applying selective methodologies in a case study in Alexandria.

2015

Digital tools are changing the way of Cultural Heritage is shared and understood in society. However, the key to improve truly the common knowledge about Cultural Heritage could be especially in a multidisciplinary approach in research and in the dissemination of its outcomes. The paper focuses on a multidisciplinary approach by involving Urban and Architectural History, GIS and 3D modeling. It discusses how new technologies especially help in reconsidering the state of the art and in making understandable the historical process of architecture within the changes of the city. The authors present this approach applied to a range of 19 th and 20 th Turin Cultural Heritage, at architectural and urban scale: the large range of buildings designed by Alessandro Antonelli and the destroying and rebuilding of a street with homogeneous front, via Roma, in the Thirties. Research uses GIS, 3D models and digital platforms in order to visualize changes also making visible ideas and designs never realized. Digital platforms link buildings and urban areas to drawings and documents preserved in city museums and archives. The aim is to make truly accessible both historical information and different kind of Cultural Heritage. The conclusion is that this approach to the historical research could improve a wider access to the Cultural Heritage by enhancing the perceptions and the understandings of the relationships between buildings within the cities, also revealing the Cultural Heritage in archives and museums.

2017

The research group on four-dimensional research and communication of urban history (HistStadt4D) aims to investigate and develop methods and technologies to transfer extensive repositories of historical media and their contextual information into a threedimensional spatial model, with an additional temporal component. This will make content accessible to different target groups, researchers and the public, via a 4D browser. A location-dependent augmented-reality representation can be used as an information base, research tool, and to communicate historical knowledge. The data resources available for this research include extensive holdings of historical photographs of Dresden, which have documented the city over the decades, and digitized map collections on the Deutsche Fotothek (German photographic collection) platform. These will lay the foundation for a prototype model which will give users a virtual experience of historic parts of Dresden.

2011

L’impostazione di un buon progetto di documentazione prevede la raccolta di tutto il materiale info-grafico disponibile, sulla base del quale è possibile fare le prime considerazioni e progettare gli interventi successivi. Si può quindi distinguere una prima attività off-site, seguita da una on-site con compiti di verifica e integrazione. Possiamo associare, metaforicamente, alla documentazione uno schema a piramide, suddiviso in tanti elementi quanti sono i livelli di conoscenza: all’estremo superiore si collocano i cataloghi, la forma più elementare di documentazione perché richiedono solo la “identificazione” (pertanto, il riconoscimento, la georeferenziazione e la memorizzazione). Alla base della piramide si trovano invece i modelli 3D ad alta risoluzione, nei quali il livello di dettaglio arriva a descrivere la tessitura muraria dei materiali che li costituiscono. Nello spazio intermedio si collocano, in modo coordinato, ogni altra rappresentazione bi- o tridimensionale realizzata sulla base di dati metrici e attraverso un rilievo multi-risoluzione con tecniche di acquisizione multisensore.

Handbook of Research on Emerging Digital Tools for Architectural Surveying, Modeling, and Representation, 2015

Aim of this paper is focusing on experiences that combine an analysis on territorial, urban and architectural scale with computerized techniques of representation. These experiments (conducted in PRIN 2006 and 2008 national researches) had as focus the use and development of information systems to test their efficiency as an aid to analysis and survey of the Cultural Heritage, specially Urban and Architectural Heritage. Particulary, the aim of this paper is focusing on experiences that combine an analysis on territorial, urban and architectural scale with computerized techniques of representation.

Digital Applications in Archaeology and Cultural Heritage, 2020

Urban cultural heritage is taking full advantage of digital technologies. This can be seen in the great number of digital tools for representing and interacting with cultural heritage (digital urban heritage tools) that are intended for the public or designed in the context of research programs and dedicated to a more limited public. These tools do not only display heritage, but also permit interaction with it, even allowing users to contribute with their own data (knowledge, memories, documents, questions, etc.). In this article, we present and apply a methodology for describing, analysing and comparing these tools. After observing the lack of such a methodology, we built DHAL (Digital urban Heritage tools AnaLysis). This methodology allows for qualitative and multidisciplinary analysis of digital urban heritage tools that combine at least two of the following aspects: digital representation of the city, multimedia data documenting the city and its heritage, and participatory functionalities for adding to the digital city. Firstly, we introduce the methodology and the process established for building it. We then show its application, usefulness and full potential in the context our project (Fab-Pat) by testing it on twelve tools. This implementation-one possible among others-allows the positioning of the Fab-Pat tool among similar tools and a detailed description of them. We conclude with a discussion of the methodology's advantages and potential avenues for future developments.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to address the challenge for knowledge exchange between disciplines that study past urban landscapes, such as archaeologists, historians and historical geographers and disciplines that work on new urban landscapes such as architects and spatial planners. It presents the design, deployment and evaluation of a heritage instrument, the “digital cultural biography” (DCB),which aims to allow future-oriented disciplines to make more historical and heritage informed decisions. Design/methodology/approach – The paper makes three contributions. First it presents a methodology to disseminate geographic information across disciplines by applying the biography of the landscape research strategy. Second it translates this methodology to a digital instrument, the DCB, which makes it possible to configure the historical and heritage features diachronically as well as spatially. And third it evaluates the added value of this instrument by organizing a design concourse and applying various evaluation methods. The Roman neighbourhood of Testaccio functions as the use case for this study. Findings - There search shows a high potential to use digital tooling based on geospatialtechnologies to support the dialogue between future and past-oriented disciplines. Originality/value – The paper discusses how the recently developed biography of the landscape method can be used as a tool for collaboration between heritage managers and spatial planners. Moreover, for the first time it applies and evaluates digital tools and geospatial technologies to support this approach. Keywords Urban design, Heritage, Knowledge exchange, Architectural management, Geospatial technologies

TMA66, 2022

Het Tijdschrift voor Mediterrane Archeologie is een onafhankelijk tijdschrift dat aandacht besteedt aan actueel archeologisch onderzoek in de mediterrane wereld, in het bijzonder verricht vanuit Nederland en België. Bijdragen van lezers kunnen al dan niet verkort door de redactie worden geplaatst. TMA werkt met single blind peer review. TMA verschijnt twee keer per jaar. Opgave kan schriftelijk of via onze website. Een abonnement kost €20,-. Studenten betalen €15,-(onder vermelding van studentnummer). Het abonnement loopt van 1 januari tot en met 31 december en wordt automatisch verlengd, tenzij een maand van tevoren schriftelijk is opgezegd.

Proceedings of the International Symposium Heritage for Planet Earth 2018, 2018

The objective of the paper is to present the results of research and documentation methods established by using modern digital technologies (including photogrammetry and 3D documentation). An example will be a comparison of research results from two archaeological sites in Poland with different cultural context – modern residential buildings in Warsaw (Masovian Province) and the castle of the Teutonic Order in Pasłęk (Warmian-Masurian Province). We would like to draw attention to the need and necessity of using such documentation methods in archaeological research for proper protection of cultural heritage.